State Dept Looks Other Way on Christian Slaughter in Middle East

The Obama administration in general, and the State Department in specific, has a vested interest in a successful outcome for nations that were involved in the Arab Spring. After all, we didn’t just watch the political purging of that season from afar. Instead, we were rhetorically engaged in the removal of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and militarily engaged in the ousting of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.

And perhaps this vested interest explains why our state department is now going out of its way to hide the atrocities Christians face at the hands of Islamists who emerged victorious following the Arab Spring.

Here’s the dirty little secret: the political purges that took place in the Middle East during 2011 continue even now–they’re just not strictly political anymore. Instead, they are religious purges carried out by the Islamists who rose to predominance via the Arab Spring. And what this means is that the Middle East has become a very dangerous place for Christians who are being murdered in cold blood (and in plain sight) in countries like Egypt.

Yet on May 24, when the State Department released a Human Rights report that covered countries involved in the Arab Spring, it conveniently omitted “sections covering religious freedom.” And as problematic as this omission is, equally troubling is the fact that the Human Rights report was issued three months past the deadline Congress had set for its submission. This delay gives the impression that there must have been some back and forth within the State Department, as they were trying to decide how much of the truth they could and couldn’t reveal about the political and religious climate the Arab Spring ushered in.

The bottom line: the State Department’s Human Rights report fails to report Human Rights violations that are religious in nature, and that’s either because reporting the deaths of Christians would shine a bad light on the Islamists who are now in charge, or because it would shine a bad light on the State Department that helped put them in charge (or both).